Generative AI is revolutionizing business, and the next big shift is happening in the world of sales. Gone are the days of generic sales pitches. With GenAI, sales teams can harness data to precisely target customers’ needs and desires. Our experts at Simon-Kucher Elevate give you a detailed outlook on the technology’s use cases.
Most changes in our world are slow-paced – but it’s always wise to watch out for developments that can explode into exponential growth. One of these revolutions is happening in the domain of generative AI – particularly in the domain of sales.
Those who master the technology will have key knowledge to come out on top of their competitors, fostering better sales relationships with stakeholders and existing clients. Alongside opportunities for lead generation and sales acquisitions, ChatGPT and its successor also offer huge potential for interactive training, accompanying your sales teams as personal assistants along their sales journeys.
At Simon-Kucher Elevate, we guide you through prioritizing the right aspects of the tech and advise on the successful adoption and roll out of important business cases.
Transforming your customer relationship management with GenAI
Automate and enhance your CRM systems. Once you give ChatGPT access to your sales data, you gain enormous benefits by saving time for relevant tasks, increasing the accuracy of your sales efforts, and utilizing the full potential for customization.
Most sales teams right now are overloaded. They need to follow up with clients and send out reminders. A lot of these tasks can be automated, and more and more CRM systems provide updated functionalities:
Automated CRM follow-ups: Timely follow-ups are critical to building strong customer relationships. But with an ever-expanding customer base, manually tracking customers in Excel silos and reaching out to them can become an overwhelming task. Using analyses from past sales interactions, integrated GenAI systems can build timely and targeted follow-up strategies with a high probability of success.
Prioritizing leads: Some customers might be close to making a purchase decision, while others are still in the early stages of exploration. GenAI can swiftly rank and score high-value leads in your CRM, telling you exactly who to keep contacting and when.
Personalized customer communications: By analyzing customer data, purchase history, preferences, and behavior, GenAI can create dynamic content tailored to each customer's interests and needs. All information is instantly accessible in your CRM. Whether it's product recommendations, promotional offers, or updates, GenAI ensures that every interaction feels unique and relevant to each customer.
Churn management: Generative AI can craft customized one-to-one messages for customers to mitigate the risk of churn. This functionality elevates the tried and tested churn prediction systems to new heights.
Product and service recommendations: Generative AI can use insights from purchase histories, customer touchpoints (such as chats and call transcripts) to recommend new products or services that your customers are likely interested in. Historically, recommendation systems have been complex and challenging to build. GenAI makes this service accessible for more and more sales teams.
The shift in technology is happening now! Salesforce has already integrated GenAI functions to create custom content for lead generation, helping your sales staff to focus on high-value tasks. But there are also many customized solutions that can take your sales process to the next level. Our experts from Simon-Kucher Elevate know exactly which solution will work for you.
Not all leads are created equal: Revolutionizing lead generation and sales processes with GenAI
Unleash the full force of generative AI to follow leads, support you in sales talks, and to close deals. GenAI can intelligently target potential prospects, using your previous customer touchpoints and interactions, including social media, phone calls, and website views. Join the GenAI revolution, and you’ll never have to worry about finding the right message for the right person – GenAI does it for you.
Finding high value customers: GenAI offers invaluable new interaction points with customers. Through natural-sounding customer support, it can derive insights into customer needs. Large Language Models (LLMs) can be utilized to analyze this data for topics, sentiment, and keywords to level-up your trend forecasting, recommendation systems, and many more applications.
AI-assisted sales pitches: GenAI can generate custom sales pitches based on your most valued customers’ profiles and preferences, keeping you one step ahead of your competition. It can analyze existing email chains to explore customer wants and needs and utilize sentiment analyses to discover new potential angles for your sales pitches. Beyond the language domain, it can utilize image generation models to create targeted images for different customer segments, empowering your sales staff to close more deals than ever before.
Real-time sales call assistance: Use GenAI to set up a system that automatically provides recommendations during sales talks. The system provides additional infographics directly on-screen to support your team members’ sales arguments and nudges them to make the sale at the right moment. GenAI can intervene whenever you need to provide customized insights and data analytics.
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While all these measures will help to level up your sales process, it’s important to know the limitations of this transformative technology as well as navigate the risks. We can help you understand every obstacle in your way and help you mitigate technological risk for your business. Our solutions focus on increasing transparency in sales recommendations, not hiding everything in a black box – keeping human sales managers in control as the last decision maker, so that you grow with the technology together.
Elevating your sales training to uncover new opportunities
Generative AI can level-up your sales training and onboarding processes, significantly improving the output of your sales teams by effectively communicating your sales handbooks and best practices.
Three key business training cases with GenAI
Personalized sales training: GenAI can conduct training exercises with personalized training recommendations based on your sales staff’s strengths, weaknesses, and historical sales performance data. The AI can instantly identify key areas for improvement and create custom training modules for individuals or groups of salespeople.
GenAI keeps your training materials relevant and targeted, maximizing the effectiveness of your sales rep’s learning processes. Whether it's refining communication skills, objection handling, or testing detailed knowledge of the product portfolio and rollout of the most recent sales strategies and practices, GenAI training content can cater to specific needs and support your teams in their continuous professional development.
Sales teams could be further supported by dynamic sales scripts where the language and content are adjusted based on the customer needs, responses, or industrial trends.
Performance-based trend analysis: Training is an ongoing activity. Generative AI can identify patterns within existing sales data from CRM systems to enable instant feedback, adaptive Q&A, interactive content generation, and scenario analysis.
Using top performers as role models, the salesperson’s interactions could be continually developed through analysis of customer interactions and feedback, with support of continual recommendations and suggestions. GenAI can also provide bite-sized information or microlearning modules to sales teams based on their current needs or gaps in knowledge, ensuring continuous learning.
At Simon-Kucher Elevate we provide your sales managers with the right tools to enhance your employee training programs – leveling up your individual sales approaches to convert more leads and close deals successfully.
Chatbots and virtual assistants: Creating a virtual assistant is a one-stop-shop where a salesperson can ask questions and get instance answers, allowing them to clarify their doubts. For example, you can create a pricing specialist bot with embedded pricing controls and rule sets to answer any pricing questions instantly.
The chatbots can also create interactive scenarios where salespeople can practice their pitches, deals, and objections and handle different types of customers. You can then use GenAI to create a list of possible client questions for the salesperson to prepare for.
Unlocking the synergy between your sales staff and generative AI
It’s a common misconception that generative AI has the potential to take over most sales processes. Comparable to the advent of phones, computers, and the internet, generative AI will become an integrated part of our workplaces, helping sales teams to target the best possible results. Instead of replacing sales processes, GenAI will augment them and turn into a virtual assistant and data analyst that you can call upon whenever you need help.
Certainly, many organizations are hesitant to jump on the generative AI train, because they lack an understanding of the technology and don’t trust artificial intelligence, or they fear their workflows might be disrupted.
A common choice many sales departments are making is to wait for GenAI to further progress. But then it might be too late. Competitors might advance so far that technological gaps can only be closed with immeasurable efforts.
Focusing your sales resources on what really matters
It’s time to use the untapped potential of your data with GenAI! With the help of our Simon-Kucher Elevate experts, you can build trust in your sales organization by learning how generative AI can complement human skills rather than undermining expertise.
There is enormous potential for synergy effects to be uncovered – by helping your sales staff to reduce time and effort for many simple tasks such as setting up the next meeting, responding to common questions, and summarizing previous meetings into easy to catch bullet points.
Additional support functions such as data analysis, lead scoring, and trend identification can help focus the salesperson’s efforts. This frees salespeople’s resources, so that they can focus on building relationships, understanding customer needs, and delivering personalized solutions.
Overcoming privacy concerns and compliance risk
Certainly, there are many other obstacles in the way to success. Sales managers need the consent of their customers to use their historical data to comply with regulations.
Bias mitigation is another issue, as AI algorithms learn from data sources that go far back in time, they could hide biases. These lead to discriminatory sales practices, making it crucial for businesses to monitor and mitigate any biases that arise during the training of GenAI models.
To always be on the safe side, it’s time to bring in the advice of experts!
At Simon-Kucher Elevate we know how to set up generative AI responsibly and streamline them to maximize synergy effects with your sales organization. When you combine the power of CRM transformation, innovative lead generation, and enhanced training, there are endless opportunities to be uncovered.
Contact us today to learn more! And join in the tech revolution.